I was taking a little hiatus from blogging and didn't realize that my hosting company expected me to pay for their service...

I'll try to file more dispatches from the IT front, but in all honesty, we are sort of in a state of trench warfare in the battle against the curry-scented wage pirates. My own recent experiences as an IT contractor indicate that slumdog H-1Bs are fewer and farther between in corporate IT as the economy has picked up pace. Wages for guys like me are rising, and although they are not at dot-com era levels, they are up.

Clearly the IT companies that used to purge American techies to make way for bugger-farming chair-warmers from the land that time forgot have learned a lesson -- DON'T CONFUSE PRICE WITH VALUE. With the H-1B cap still in place and some high-profile lawsuits, companies are now forced to deal with the market forces of supply and demand. Now that I am on the market again, having escaped another Desi manager and his H-1B-turned GC-carrying tech lead at a place that shall remain nameless, I can attest to the relative shift in the demographics of the IT landscape. Of course, I still get the numerous calls from marble-mouthed retards like "Amit from Macrosoft" wanting to see if I am interested in a COBOL position in Des Moines, but even the calls from the Desi bodyshops seem to be less frequent, now coming in at 3 or 4 a day instead of 10 or 12. Case in point, Molina Healthcare, a notorious curry den here in SoCal that got caught purging whitey to make way for a pack of jackals from Cognizant, is now actively recruiting programmers to clean up the mess that the slumdogs left. A recruiter even referred to "that H-1B thing" at Molina in a recent phone call I had.

I always found it amazing that the biggest advocates for having unlimited H-1Bs pour into our country are usually the free-market plutocrats that opine at places like the Wall Street Journal. Speaking about the WSJ, I've heard from a few insurgents that there is reporter sniffing around and wanting to talk to the infamous Tunnel Rat. FYI, Tunnel Rat doesn't speak to journalists that work for an organ of the hi-tech regime that would like to see him making Mumbai-level rates coding complex software. There are almost 10 years of posts here to read, including a screenplay, so what more can I add for his below-the-fold Section B story? I bet he is expecting to hear some sob story about a middle-aged hack who didn't see the writing on the wall when his whole IT department started smelling like tandori chicken and everybody began communicating in broken English, and then found himself a victim of occupational apartheid, jobless and bitter, left to vent on his blog. That is what they always want, because that is all you read about when you see a story about the H-1Bs. The theme follows a pattern - poor, brilliant Kumar who can't get a green card or naive Ashish living in a guest house with 10 other slumdogs in Edison, or the 40-something techie out on his ass, going on his second year of non-work, bitching about how some douchebag named Amir flooded his old company with slumdogs.

You will never hear about the ex-Marine who got his Desi boss shit-canned for trying to game the recruiting process at a big-ass tech company so that he could flood his department with fellow upper-caste Indians, preferably from Gujarit. Yeah, that guy -- the one who can tell recruiters to literally fuck off when they send him a req. with a below-market rate and an invitation to meet with the hiring manager named Rajeet. No, that narrative doesn't play well with the subscribers to the WSJ, who bitch and moan about having to pay circa-1999 wages to developers with cutting edge skills and twenty years experience in IT -- THOSE FUCKERS WANT A 25-YEAR OLD SLUMDOG WITH THE SAME CV, AT HALF THE PRICE.

There Is No Tech Worker Shortage And If There Is It's The Tech Companies' Fault

You may have noticed that the big tech companies are agitating for an expansion of the H1B visa system whereby foreigners with certain tech skills can come and work in the US. You know, for big tech companies and the like. Easy issuance of green cards for those with those tech skills. It’s not an unusual set of requests: the tech companies would dearly love to be able to find all the talent they think they require and obviously, just like any other business, they’d prefer to pay less rather than more for their supplies of whatever it is.

In economics, I learned that a shortage is when demand exceeds supply. People want to buy Goldfish crackers at the posted price, but the shelves go empty. I was also taught that the only way that this happens is when something stops the price from adjusting — a price-control law, perhaps, or the difficulty of printing out new prices for the shelves. Normally, I was told, the store would just raise the price until the last package of Goldfish is so expensive that no one can afford it, and there would then be no shortage.

But it looks as if I was taught the wrong definition of shortage, because everyone else in the world seems to use the word in a very different way. When normal people say, “There is a shortage,” they don’t mean, “The shelf is empty.” They mean “Please lower the price, so I don’t have to pay as much.” And when normal people say, “No, there’s no shortage,” what they mean is, “Please increase the price I get for my wares because I’d like to make more money.”

Quite so. What those big tech companies are saying isn’t that there’s a shortage of decent engineers in the US. They’re saying there’s a shortage of good engineers at the price they want to pay. The correct answer to which is that they should raise the price they’re willing to pay for good engineers. Sure, this does raise the already very high wages of Silicon Valley engineers. But as Smith points out, it starts to raise all US wages. for higher wages for engineers will lead to more training to be such engineers, leaving open the places they would have taken otherwise (say, as quants on Wall Street) and everyone in the country gets to move up a step. OK, sure, the effect of 100,000 more engineers in a society of 300 million people isn’t going to be directly measurable but it will be there.

So, Smith is entirely correct: but I would take this a stage further myself. For recall thatApple, Adobe, Google and the rest (Facebook being the odd one out, the one that refused to join in) got caught conspiring to artificially limit the wages of engineers? By having non-compete clauses in the Valley? If they hadn’t done this engineers’ salaries would be higher, this would have provided the incentive for more to train as engineers and, around and about now actually, those newly trained engineers would be hitting the job market and alleviating that “shortage” that the tech companies are complaining about.

Electronics For Imaging CEO Guy Gecht makes almost $6 million a year, but still feels the need to import slumdogs and pay them slave wages instead of hiring locals:

Eight workers from India were paid as little as $1.21 an hour by a tech company in Fremont, Calif., over several months in late 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, as reported by the Associated Press. As a result the company, Electronics for Imaging, which specializes in printing technology, agreed to pay $43,000 in back wages and government penalties. Electronics for Imaging, or EFI, said in a prepared statement that it “unintentionally overlooked” U.S. labor law and has "taken steps to ensure that this type of administrative error does not reoccur."

The workers were transferred from Bangalore, India, to help the company move into a new headquarters building. They logged as many as 122 hours a week (WTF??????) without overtime with some earning as little as $1.21 an hour. California’s minimum wage at the time was $8 an hour.

The incident is a reminder that even amid a labor market that has boomed in recent years in Silicon Valley and other parts of the Bay Area, income inequality and payments of relatively low wages can still be a problem for workers in the region. The workers were paid in Indian rupees.

"It's always amazing that some employers think they can go about with this kind of cheating," said Sylvia Allegretto, a UC Berkeley research economist and co-chair of the university's Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics.

An anonymous tip prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the case, which resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.

"There may be good reasons to bring in foreign employees to work at tech companies, but there's no good reason to pay them so little," said Jon Haveman, chief economist with San Rafael-based Marin Consulting.

The eight employees were paid to help install the company's computer network and systems in connection with the move of the company's headquarters from Foster City to Fremont.

Some employees worked up to 122 hours a week. The unlawful employment began Sept. 8, 2013, and concluded Dec. 21, 2013.

"These kinds of egregious wage and law violations go on every day," Allegretto said.

Investigators from the division's San Jose office learned that the technicians were flown in from the employer's office in Bangalore, India.

"This was discovered through an anonymous tip, and we need that kind of information to discover these sorts of illegal situations," Blanco said.

The speech attributed President Barack Obama's plans for potential executive action that would offer amnesty to some undocumented immigrants to meetings between White House officials and "the world’s most powerful corporate and immigration lobbyists and activists who think border controls are for the little people." Sessions identified Zuckerberg as a leader among pro-immigration business people.

"Mr. Zuckerberg — who has become the top spokesman for expanding the admission of foreign workers — championed the Senate immigration bill for which all of our Democratic colleagues voted," Sessions said. "One of the things the bill did was double the supply of low-wage foreign workers brought into the United States for companies such as Facebook."

"Well, the 'masters of the universe' are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates," Sessions quipped.

Sessions argued tech industry executives had falsely claimed there was a shortage of the educated workers they needed to operate in the U.S. He specifically challenged Zuckerberg, who he noted "just turned 30" and "is worth about $30 billion," to hire more American workers.

"I would pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the news that Facebook is now worth more than $200 billion. Is that not enough money to hire American workers for a change?" Sessions said. "Your company now employs roughly 7,000 people. Let’s say you want to expand your workforce 10 percent, or hire another 700 workers. Are you claiming you can’t find 700 Americans who would take these jobs if you paid a good wage and decent benefits?"

Sessions also suggested Zuckerberg wasn't doing enough to hire American workers laid off by other companies.

"Let me just say one more thing: Facebook has 7,000 workers. Microsoft just laid off 18,000. Why doesn’t Mr. Zuckerberg call his friend Mr. (Bill) Gates and say: Look, I have to hire a few hundred people; do you have any résumés you can send over here?" Sessions said. "Maybe I will not have to take somebody from a foreign country for a job an unemployed U.S. citizen might take."

A 53-year-old Maple Valley woman has filed a lawsuit accusing Microsoft of gender, race and age discrimination.

Nancy Williams said in her lawsuit, filed Monday in King County Superior Court, that she was subjected to discrimination and differential treatment, as well as a hostile work environment based on her gender, race (Hispanic) and age.

Williams, who is on medical leave from her job as a software-test manager in Microsoft Azure, has been a full-time Microsoft employee since 1996. She joined the Azure group in 2010.

Williams contends in her suit that the workplace environment at Azure, which was dominated by male engineers, a “substantial percentage of whom were foreign born and of East Indian heritage,” was not supportive of women employees.

Microsoft was aware of that but put up with it because Azure, its cloud-computing platform, was a vital part of its business strategy, the lawsuit alleges.

In a statement, Microsoft said the company “provides an environment where all employees have the opportunity to be successful. We take these claims seriously and will address them with the court.”

According to the lawsuit, Williams in March 2012 began reporting to a new boss, a foreign-born man of East Indian descent, who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Williams’ boss no longer works at Microsoft, though his departure was unrelated to this matter, according to sources close to the situation. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

The lawsuit alleges Williams’ boss ignored her during meetings, excluded her from important internal communications related to Azure, was dismissive of her suggestions and blamed her for situations that were not her responsibility, while treating his male subordinates favorably.

She also questioned her boss, and her boss’ supervisor — also of East Indian descent — over their awarding of a contract to an Indian company over other companies, the suit says.

In a meeting behind closed doors in her boss’s office in January 2013, her boss “approached Williams, who was seated, and stood over her in very close proximity,” requiring Williams to repeat several times: “You are my manager, I will do as you say,” the lawsuit contends.

Williams claims she reported this and other incidents to Microsoft’s human-resources department but was cautioned against filing a formal complaint. After she did anyway, the investigation into her case lagged while she was on a two-month sabbatical, the suit says.

She also spoke of her boss’s behavior to his supervisors — also of East Indian descent — but either nothing was done or she was told her complaints would lead to negative discussions about her performance, according to the suit.

Upon her return from sabbatical, the suit alleges, Williams’ boss gave her a very low rating in her performance review and waved his fists in her face.

Williams claims she suffered panic attacks and her health began to erode.

She is seeking double the amount of her lost salary and bonus and stock awards incurred to date and which will accrue in the future, unspecified additional damages, and costs and attorney’s fees.

Williams is also asking the court to order an independent audit of the human-resources department’s practices and require that every Azure employee get training on discrimination, hostile work environments and retaliation.

It looks like the shills for the ethic cleansing of American techies are getting called out for their propaganda:

Silicon Valley has created an imaginary staffing shortage.

Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a "shortage" of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislationthat, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.

As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages.

Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of layoffs.

The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers (native and immigrant, citizen and permanent resident) who are willing and qualified to fill the high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether supply is two or three times larger than the demand.

Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and the middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.

As soon as insurgents saw the elevation of Microsoft's Satya Nadella to CEO, they knew that the ethnic cleansing of non-Indians would begin. At least U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions had the balls to call bullshit on Mr. Softie's need for H-1Bs as it purges a bunch of crackers from its ranks:

“Super billionaires aren’t happy apparently. … They declare we need to import more foreign workers,” Sessions said on the Senate floor Thursday. “Mr. Gates says we need to let more and more people into our country to take those kinds of jobs.”

Sessions was referring to an op-ed in which Gates called on the House to pass the bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill. That legislation would increase the number of worker visas for immigrants in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Sessions pointed out that Microsoft announced Thursday that it plans to layoff nearly 20,000 workers in an effort to streamline. He said those workers should take priority over immigrants.

Sessions also cited a recent U.S. census reports that stated 75 percent of U.S. citizens with STEM degrees aren’t working in that field.

“We need them working first before we bring more people in,” Sessions said. “I don’t think you can make the argument that we have a labor shortage.”

Sessions has been an ardent critic of the Senate-passed immigration reform bill, which also would provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants within the United States and increase spending for border security.

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.